Shasha Beard - Journalism 4250

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Eye cream anyone? Exfoliator? Okay, okay, am I partly to blame?? I was at work the other day, promoting the relentless beauty industry and hawking our large array of lifting, firming, de-wrinkling, de-flaking, de-poring and hey,-we-think-you-just-need-a-new-face products when a co-worker brought in the new W magazine. All tasks for the day were put off until tomorrow as the most important item on our evening agenda consisted of vicariously attending Hollywood benefits, mixers and even the wedding of Camilla Parker-Bowles´son through the glossy pages. Okay, now there is a point to all of this that involves the portrayal of sex in the media; I just needed to provide the background information. I fell into the gig of make-up, skincare artistry and sales while in college by accident, and have been riding it as an easy source of income ever since. It really hasn´t been a bad ride at all. It´s a great distraction, it´s all about fashion, color and design, and it has introduced me to a whole world of people and commerce that I had no idea existed. Again, I digress. So how excited was I when the feature article in this month´s W is an interview and photo spread with Tom Ford, the ever-so controversial designer for the House of Gucci. (btw, I think it is so deliciously ostentatious to name off a well-known designer by preluding it with the title, ¨House of.¨ Don´t you love that? Okay, alright, not really.) Well the article couldn´t have been of more perfect timing. It´s all about America, the fashion industry and the pysche underlying it all via Ford´s semi-intelligent brusqueness.Next entry: I give excerpts from the article...they´re almost brilliant, reallyAnd the next: My thoughts

Saturday, November 12, 2005

(I didn´t really write this before the blog above, but I changed the date so it would come after. I am trying to add drama.No, I am really trying to break this up a little.)Parts from W´s Interview with the Devil Himself, aka Fashion´s Sexual Pied Piper aka Did Anyone Ever Think These People Are Smart Too?? heheheBut first: Tom Ford is on top of the fashion world, most famously known for his post as Gucci´s creative director. He has recently joined forces with Estée Lauder, (America´s first cosmetic line to go big and global back in the day) to revive the Youth Dew fragrance (that stuff we thought only our grandmothers liked that makes you slightly dizzy with one whiff) for a hipper audience.I have included some excerpts from his interview with W magazine because some of his comments really stuck out at me. I am not sure if this is allowed, but hey, this is the internet, hehe. Forgive me, media professors who might know the answer. My ultimate wish of course would have been to bring Ford to class for a discussion..it turns out he obtained a design degree in New York and Paris. Here is what he had to say about the fashion and beauty industry.¨We´ve become plastic, objectifying the human body...waxed and polished and buffed and shined up and manipulated,¨ Ford says. ¨And then, of course, I´m portrayed as the one doing the manipulating, the polishing, buffing, shaping, which is what I do. It´s just what we do. What the fashion industry does....Like for example, we live in a hairless society. There was a moment in time when if you were watching porn, or saw just any model or actor or man, there was hair...men had mustaches. Men had chest hair. We´re also living in a very plastic moment where everything is manufactured and pumped up. Lips are pumped up. Butts are pumped up. What´s happening culturally carries over onto the human form, and at the moment they´re busty and big and pumped up....We´ve got these weird lips that don´t really look like lips. We´ve started to lose touch with what real breasts look like, we´ve started to lose the animal side of our nature...we treat women almost like cars. It´s happened over the last 25 years. When we were kids, it was lift and separate. Now of course, Victoria´s Secret pushes it all together. ...Our beauty standard today is cartoonlike, and it´s artificial.¨So, do Kilbourne and Ford need to get together and have coffee, or did they already?? I doubt it, hehe.But there´s more, like this remark; it´s totally Twitchell:¨...Insecurity was introduced by deodorant. We grew up watching all these deodorant commercials. This girl sweats, and oh my God, it ruins her interview, and her whole life falls apart. She´s got to have her antiperspirant. Now she doesn´t sweat. Her life is great, blah, blah blah. It happens with each new thing that is available--I need a polish, a buff. It turns people into cars. I love cars, but I don´t want to f--- my car.¨Here´s one more thing I couldn´t help but steal from the article to put in my blog. It´s a quote from Estée Lauder:¨When sex goes out of business, so do we.¨So I am not busted for plagiarism:

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Much Ado About...gasp! Muslims!!!

There is a great article on CNN.com about comedian Albert Brooks´ new movie. It pokes fun at American ignorance toward Muslim culture. The article itself is actually about Sony Picture´s reluctancy to release the film with its original title, ¨Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,¨ simply because of the word, ¨Muslim.¨ The media coglomerate fears the title creating a negative buzz at ticket lines!!

This reaches a score of at least 8 on my irritation meter. Since when did Muslim become a bad word? When we can prove our own lack of global awareness who needs a satire? Muslim does not only mean Arab, extremist or terrorist. I found it interesting that so many scenes for the film were shot in Indian mosques, not Middle Eastern.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

I have posted some links of the best and worst primary and secondary reports on both women. Lynch definitely received more attention in the media. Johnson´s story of being shot in her ankles and publicly displayed as a prisoner of war was chilling; I was surprised to not see much sensationalism around her for that.

This is a great story. It´s short, to the point and exposes some details that don´t appear in all articles about Jessica Lynch that are written in the U.S. The part about American soldiers opening fire on the rescue ambulance coming to bring her to safety was quite interesting.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stmAlthough, bbcnews.com really impressed me with their stories on Jessica Lynch, I was not able to find an article solely devoted to Shoshana Johnson there either.